Saturday, February 2, 2013

“No Struggle, No Progress” Frederick Douglass (1857)

Since this weekend marks the beginning of Black History
Month, I thought it would be right and fitting to start with a an
excerpt from a speech given by the incomparable Frederick Douglas. Though his
philosophy was quite different than that of Martin Luther King(as you will read), he is
still one of my all time favorite men in American History. His courage and boldness flow with
such poetic grace it is astounding.

August 3, 1857 - Canandaigua, New York

The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for
himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought
for by others, and this sentiment is just. For a man who does not value
freedom for himself will never value it for others, or put himself to
any inconvenience to gain it for others. Such a man, the world says, may
lie down until he has sense enough to stand up. It is useless and cruel
to put a man on his legs, if the next moment his head is to be brought
against a curbstone.

Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of
the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to
her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has
been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting
all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If
there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor
freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without
plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning.
They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it
may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find
out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out
the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon
them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words
or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the
endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas,
Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so
long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance,
either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this
world, but they must certainly pay for all they get.